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When the big clock starts ticking on Friday at Nathan Phillips Square, it not only signifies that the
Pan Am and Parapan American Games
will open in Toronto in July 2015. It’s also a reminder that the clock is ticking for Don Shipley, as he scrambles to create Panamania, the
arts festival
that runs throughout the city to provide a cultural flip side to the athletics of the main event.

And I predict that before many months click away on that clock, we will get official news that
Soulpepper Theatre
’s headquarters at the Young Centre in the Distillery District will become one of the key places to hang out for those seeking performance experiences beyond the mainstream fare Pan Am crowds will take in at Nathan Phillips Square.

“When I arrived at Pan Am, my first goal was to meet all the cultural stakeholders and get the artists involved,” Shipley said in an interview at the lakeside Toronto 2015 Games office. “We needed to get them engaged and find out where we could find ideas, passion and innovation.”

But when Shipley invited people in the community to submit original projects for Panamania funding, Albert Schultz, Soulpepper Theatre’s artistic director, did not take the bait.

With a budget of $1.5 million, Shipley and his advisers (a judging panel of 14 experts) selected 27 projects, giving them seed money to write plays, hire and rehearse actors, musicians and visual artists. But the winners must be able to demonstrate by November that they will be ready for world premieres next July during the Games. Don’t be surprised if a few of the 27 don’t wind up on the final program.

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No doubt, thousands of people will take in free concerts at Nathan Phillips Square. And there are sure to be a huge number of ticket buyers for the opening ceremonies next July 10 featuring a new show created by
Cirque du Soleil
.

As Shipley disclosed, that event will take place at the Rogers Centre, where the seating in the round and the retractable roof help create the perfect atmosphere.

While declining to pitch a specific new show for Panamania funding, Schultz had bigger ideas of how to partner with Shipley.

As a result, we can expect some of the most adventurous projects to have their world premieres at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts.

Two of the highest profile projects will not be among them and have already been assigned to the Bluma Appel Theatre in the St. Lawrence Centre. That’s where we can look forward to the world premiere of
887
, a new solo
play
from Robert Lepage’s Ex Machina company. For the first time in years, Toronto will get a chance to see Lepage starring in his own work, not just writing and directing.

Also slated for the Bluma Appel stage is
Betroffenheit
, in which star choreographer Crystal Pite teams with Jonathan Young, artistic director of Electric Company Theatre, to create a hybrid of dance and theatre.

The Bluma has a capacity of 876, but the Young Centre offers a cluster of small-to-medium performance spaces, which makes it perfect for shows that need intimacy.

And it also provides a solution for a Soulpepper problem for which Panamania could have been blamed.

Schultz did not submit a project for funding because the prospect of the 2015 Games in Toronto presented a challenge for Soulpepper that couldn’t be solved by a few performances of one play.

“We are already squeezed in September by TIFF and in June by Luminato,” Schultz told me the other day.

It’s hard to get media attention or attract audiences in those two months for Soulpepper. Being a year-round operation, unlike most Toronto producing organizations, Soulpepper in most years has a good run in the summer after Luminato and before TIFF.

But in 2015, with the Pan Am Games and Panamania dominating July, that coveted summer interlude for Soulpepper could vanish, creating a dead zone.

The solution: make the Young Centre a cultural hub for Panamania.

So why not come up with a co-venture involving creative input from Soulpepper?

It happens that this week Soulpepper is unveiling a show that I wouldn’t want to miss. (The first performance is on Friday, July 11, with a repeat on Tuesday, July 15.)

New York City! A 20th-Century Musical Ride
is the latest in a series of salon shows. This one will take the audience on a trip from one end of Manhattan to the other. The dazzling cast includes Jackie Richardson, arguably Toronto’s all-time greatest blues and gospel singer, and the phenomenal Judith Lander, who wowed a small audience recently with a Soulpepper salon performance featuring songs by Kurt Weill and Jacques Brel.

Patricia O’Callaghan and music director Mike Ross will also be featured, with Schultz as host and tour guide. In all, there will be 14 performers onstage, including a small band, and you can expect to hear songs by George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Paul Simon, Weill and two Leonards: Bernstein and Cohen.

Let’s connect the dots. Wouldn’t it be a perfect match for Panamania to do a 2015 Games salon show, presented at the Young Centre and produced by Soulpepper, celebrating a whole range of great songs from many of the 41 countries of the Americas?

I tried this out on Shipley and he agreed it’s a good idea. It could be a way for Panamania and Soulpepper to play nicely together while putting a lot of people in a great Pan Am state of mind.

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